Sunday, February 04, 2007

Having Been Run Over by a Train ...

... is how I feel. An exciting train, an intensely up-and-down mountain sort of train, a train that has kept me on my tiny toes, but a train nonetheless. Which is why I've spent so much of my time since I got home yesterday either asleep or drinking many, many cups of Earl Grey tea. (The tea of choice for train crash victims and writers at the end of tours everywhere.)

The Questors tour was great! The grown-up organising-type people were great! The kids I talked to were great! I was completely thrown a bunch of times when the numbers were way bigger than I'd expected, or the age range of the group was way younger - or way older - than I'd expected, but by dint of some more-or-less gazelle-like editing in mid-stream (do you get gazelles in streams?) it all worked out. Really well. Okay, it was fabulous - I loved it!

Fascinating, the differences between one group of kids and the next, one teacher and the next, one school/library/bookshop/bit of the country and the next. I guess adrenalin does this to you, but I have all these incredibly vivid snapshots, mostly of faces, racing about in my head. Snippets of conversations. Odd bits of architecture. And what do you think I should do with this bright, shiny material? Well, my current plan is to make it a cup of tea, and go to bed.